Inventing Modernity I: The Struggle for Selfhood and the Rise of the Novel

Catalog description

This class will survey canonical European novels and ask why prose fiction became, arguably, the characteristic literary form of Western modernity. That period in Europe was marked by a steady stream of cultural innovations, scientific discoveries, and political revolutions. What work did the novel do, and how did it change to keep up with those ever-changing times? With its emphasis on the particular over the universal, the real over the ideal, the novel must surely have been useful to Europeans trying to understand and improve their time, their communities, their historical moment, their relationship to nature and religion. But if the novel was therefore a kind of modern epic, its protagonist was usually an individual, not a representative hero, and its most compelling action scenes often took place, not on battlefields or in courts, but within the mind of the protagonist. Accordingly, while this class will consider each novel in relation to its immediate social and political context, connection to contemporary philosophy, and particular contribution to the aesthetics of the form, we will consider the tendency within the most highly-praised novels to provide highly charged narratives of internal thought processes rather than action based on resolved ideas. When and why did how we think and feel become more exciting, more aesthetically satisfying, than what we think and feel? Readings will probably include: Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders; Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.